Smart TV in India
Televisions today are experiencing the same reinvention as the telephone did in 1990s when the first smartphone was introduced. Almost a decade later, TV OEMs woke up to the first screen of our lives — “Televisions” and began to transform it to “Smart Televisions” of today relocating its tenor in households.
Gone are the days when people bought television sets for watching traditional broadcasted content at a specific time of the day (Linear TV). The way people watch TV today has been analyzed and a change in consumer behavior have occurred over the last decade. The TV viewers have gone from a relaxed TV mood with all focus directed towards the TV to a multitasking mood, using second screens for additional activities which may or may not be related to the content on TV. Access to Internet based services has leeway to watch content on demand at their own comfort and leisure (Non Linear TV). It has no longer remained an ‘idiot box’ and has now taken up a stable position in the family of screens along with computers, tablets and smartphones.
PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCE OR SHARED EXPERIENCE?
We all live in a cloud world where all our data, browsing histories, favourite applications etc. are known to ‘somebody’ out there. Imagine receiving recommendations specific to your account profile when you come back home after work with a press of a button! How does that contrast with TV always perceived to be a shared device for everyone at home? People’s relationship with smart TV is changing from a shared experience to both personalized and shared experience where anyone and everyone can now access personalised content on demand.
TV has always been perceived to be ‘lean back experience’ as opposed to smartphones and tablets, which are considered to be ‘lean forward experiences’. For most of the people especially homemakers, watching content on television at home has been a background/ parallel activity. According to an extensive research by Microsoft, there can be four different levels of engagement — High i.e. watching TV with full concentration, Medium i.e. watching TV while doing another activity like — dinner, reading, checking emails etc., Low i.e. watching TV as a secondary activity with a different primary activity like exercising, cooking etc., and None — having TV like an ‘Always On’ where it is then considered to be complete background noise. Needless, it largely depends on the content, surroundings, state of mind, time of the day etc.
As pointed out by Katherine Rosman in her article back in 2013, people watch more television programming, just from a growing range of devices and platforms. Traditional TV or cable network fare is now available online, via streaming services like YouTube for free of cost or on Netflix for sale, to be watched on mobile phones and tablets. Time spent on watching content on television screens is now expected to increase with most of the smart TV’s now enabling viewers to watch on demand streaming media with these apps that can be purchased from the app store. With availability of most content online, time spent on a specific device has become a very personalized choice for people. People have their own perception for different screens in today’s world. It depends of different factors like display size, distance of viewing, context of use, place of use etc. Many social networking apps like Facebook, Twitter etc. and game apps are now available for TV platforms and this has spurred the interconnectedness across all these devices at home.
Television watching can be both private as well as a shared experience. Legacy has surmised the living room of the house to be a hub of family entertainment or a canteen stall in a small village community where people watch television together and has mostly been regarded as a group activity. With the new smart TV’s in the picture now, it is also turning into a very personalized experience for a user living in the cloud world accessing the same applications on TV and his other smart devices. So how private does a user feel with his/her smart TV? On one hand, TV is a shared medium for the family, and on the other hand is a social media which is based on individuals (privacy) who share and produce content. Parents keep a very close watch on the content that their children are watching on televisions and would not like to have access to certain channels and apps on their TV. Are smart TV’s smart enough to recognize the viewer(s) at home e.g. guests and then deliver content that protects the privacy of the owner?
10 FEET EXPERIENCES
Despite the obscure differences between the usages of these devices across common online content, watching content on television screens (10 feet experiences — as it is popularly referred to) enunciates different physical settings for e.g. viewing distances and therefore these experiences are very different from other handheld mobile devices. The medium of interaction — a remote control abets diverse challenges for the applications designed for TV viewing. An application designed for a touch screen device requires to be redesigned for TV interfaces. Apart from obvious tweaks in layout resolutions, asset & font sizes etc. many a times an application’s other design features like search, settings, favorites, sign in, etc., are restructured on the architecture level. Such conscious application changes ensure optimum usability on large screens but needs careful consideration so as to maintain seamless experience across other devices as well. For e.g. YouTube app from Google is very well designed differently for both TV and mobile devices.
Back in 1970’s — 80’s when we only had 0–9 channels to choose from, there was a perfect way to interact with television. We had a power on/off switch, channel and volume buttons and a numeric keypad. No directional pad, settings buttons, RGBY buttons, or guide controls. They weren’t needed. Television sets were used to watch television programs, and the remote control was used to change from channel to channel. As TVs are becoming smarter, equipped with Internet streaming, Bluetooth connectivity capabilities, and Android operating systems, the function of a remote is also advancing to continue to provide an easier way to enjoy TV entertainment. These advances include a touch-pad space, more shortcuts to search, program guides, integration of its features into a mobile phone, and voice command capabilities. This has made the design of the remotes themselves much more complicated and is now undergoing a complete transformation with as minimum no of controls as possible. Remote controls are usually held and operated by a single hand and users expect instant feedback on their actions. The frequency of key presses is much faster than working on touch based devices because the decision-making is faster.
It is interesting to delve into the scenarios where the viewer’s attention is primarily on the TV screen but the physical interaction is with the remote in hand. This makes the user interface design of the applications on smart TV’s much more challenging and complex. Text entry with on screen keyboard has always been a challenge due to back and forth usage of D-pad for typing in text. Applications should limit text entry by predictive search, pre populated results, sorting techniques etc.
Back in 2013, Phillips had introduced the QUERTY keyboard at the backside of remote to assist users for text entry. User could also navigate Wii style by pointing the remote on the screen. This point and click approach was felt to be much more helpful and intuitive than Samsung’s gesture control approach. Especially as Philips had calibrated the responsiveness of the cursor’s motion so astutely that it never moved too fast or too slow. Today, physical remotes are not the only way to interact with TV. Philips has also developed the My Remote app for iOS and Android devices. This lets you control the TV via your smart phone or tablet computer — as well as watch what the TV is showing on your smart device (on iOS only at present), or to share multimedia from your smart device to the TV. With the intention to outlive all competitors, Samsung introduced the first ever voice-based commands with an inbuilt microphone in the remote. While it may have eased telling TV what you are interested in watching, but people perceived it as if “Your smart TV is eavesdropping on you”. What actually could deliver the most convenient and secure way of interacting with a smart TV?
MULTISCREEN SPACES
Kevin Ashton, a British technology pioneer coined the term “the Internet of Things” back in 1999 that aptly describes our homes and surroundings today with all the flashy, expensive, feature-packed gadgets that most of us have or at least aspire to. This is not very new to the tech geeks and has a long history of many people working on the same concept of connecting not only the screens but also other electronic devices at home. In 1990, John Romkey created the first Internet ‘device’, a toaster that could be turned on and off over the Internet. Today this has advanced to possibilities of even unlocking your home with a mobile app, to synchronizing the lights, curtains and television stands of the living room. We are now living in a world of not just ‘smart devices’ but ‘smart homes’ where devices can detect each other’s presence and deliver harmonious experiences. Where is it heading and how far are our rural homes in stepping into the digital world, which is only within the reach of affluent class?
Televisions in Indian homes have always been and will continue to retain their value with the coming age. There was a time when presence of a TV in the house decided our actions, behaviors around it and shaped our culture. It connected people together, became a medium of reaching out to millions of people, a medium of entertainment for children and adults. Then came the large screens, high-resolution smartphones and tablets with high-speed Internet connectivity, which took up most of the viewers’ attention and challenged the TV manufacturers to rethink their existence. It wasn’t long before TV’s also got ‘smarter’ but by that time, the smartphones and other devices had already altered the behavior of people. Even though Smart TV experiences are being increasingly designed to suit and adapt to the existing digital world around us but it is also influencing the culture due to blurring differences between personal devices like phone, and shared devices like TV. Today, OEM’s (like Samsung, Phillips, Sony etc.), OS platform owners (like Google, Amazon, Linux, Opera etc.) & designers work in close collaboration to empathize with the real living rooms and understand the interesting dynamics between people, devices, technology and legacy.
